She thought about it. "I don't know. I've never had reason to use that office."
"Then first thing tomorrow, before Mercer knows we're moving, I ride to Stillwater and send a wire to a man I know in Laramie. His name is Daniel Hart. He does property law and he's good at it. He owes me a favor from a situation in Casper three years ago that I won't bore you with." He looked at her steadily. "He'll come. And if he doesn't, he will."
She didn't press it. There was something in the way he said it that wasn't arrogance; it was just certainty, the kind built from knowing a specific person well enough to predict them. She filed it away and moved on.
"Even with Hart," she said, "we have thirty days. A lawyer traveling from Laramie, reviewing the documents, preparing an argument, getting a hearing scheduled with a territorial judge... it's tight. It's nearly impossible."
"Nearly," he said. And there was something almost like a smile in it—the ghost of one. "I've worked with tighter."
She studied him across the table. The lamp threw long shadows, and outside the wind had settled, and the night was particularly the kind of quiet that Wyoming nights got when they were being serious about themselves.
"Why are you doing this?" she asked.
He didn't answer immediately. He looked at the closed ledger, then at his hands, then at her. "I've ridden through a lot of towns," he said finally. "Done a lot of things I'm not proud of, and some things I am. But I've never once in my life watched a man put a whip to a woman in the public street for something that wasn't her fault, and kept riding." He paused. "Today was not the day I was going to start."
"That's a reason to stop," she said. "Not a reason to stay."
He was quiet for a moment longer. "Maybe I'm tired of moving," he said.
She didn't know what to do with that. So she didn't do anything with it. She stood and collected the cups and said, "There's a bunkhouse behind the barn. It's not much, but it has a cot and a stove. You're welcome to it for as long as this takes."
"I appreciate that, ma'am."